Source engine day/night cycle & dynamic weather

by biohazardpro

The position of the celestial bodies is dependent from season and clime. Right now the 2D skybox uses one texture with some overlays applied and a procedurally generated static mesh for stars.

All weather effects, daytime, clime and season are synced between client and server. Weather is randomly applied based on the current climate and the time of day can be read from the hosts computer.

Additional information:

The shadowmapping code is written from scratch and not based on Valves technique in any way. In my current build two shadowmaps at 3072² and 1024² are drawn to allow a shadow with a range of 10k units (the video just shows the former one though), all factors are variable and can be changed to the users liking.

During a second pass of the main view various information (worldspace normals, screenspace normals, depth, sky mask, sharpen mask) are drawn via MRTs to different textures at once to allow post processing effects like SSAO, DOF, edge detection and godrays. All screenspace effects can be individually toggled as well.

The weather effects include particle effects, fog, color correction and sounds, every weather routine can be assigned a weight to allow more variety. Particle effects are partially drawn in worldspace and a seperate view similar to how 3d skyboxes work.

Dynamic Materials with Proxies

by Andy "Velvet Fist, Iron Glove" Durdin @Nodraw.net

This picture constantly rotates.

Material proxies are a neat little feature of the Source engine that let you alter various properties of a material dynamically.  This can produce some neat effects, as the texture position, scale, rotation, transparency and much more can be changed continuously, or even in response to game events.
Take Half-life 2, for example.  You know those combine force-fields, that ripple with energy, and fade out as you move away from it?  Or in Team Fortress 2, you’ll have seen the rotating radar screen in the 2fort basement.  Both those effects are done with material proxies. Read more ...

Source Engine Dynamic Water Demo

by Jimmy42222

I know somebody has already done this but they were being all bitchy about not telling how they did it. I, however, will happily tell you how it works. The whole this is an info_particle system, stored in the little orange box (hah, pun). The info_particle_system is set to trace all around it with a trace collision property.

Here's a download link if you want to play around with it. If you do it in GMod you don't need the particle_manifest.txt file.

http://www.filefront.com/15188993/dynamic.zip